The World Outside
by padfoot's prose
Summary: Blaine has a love/hate relationship with reality. Warning for mentions of assault.


**A/N: This is sort of reaction fic to 5x15, which shocked me and made me _feel_ a lot more than I'd ever let myself hope Glee would do since sometime around season 3. So be warned for mentions of both Blaine's Sadie Hawkins and Kurt's 'Bash' incident. Also apologies for how much this jumps around. It was meant to be something else and then sort of... wasn't. So I hope it's all right as is.**

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**The World Outside**

_by padfoot_

...

There was a time in Blaine's life where he could be happy, shut up alone in a room. A time when his favourite thing to do was curl up on his parents bed and lose himself in a book, in homework, in anything at all. A time when he could forget completely about the world outside.

Not anymore though.

It's hard to forget about the world outside when there are still new bruises bursting on his skin. He feels like a Picasso – like pieces of muddled up human but nothing complete, nothing whole. The graze up his arm won't stop weeping, no matter how much antiseptic his mother rubs in.

"Hey, buddy," Cooper says on the phone, "How are you doing?"

"I want to go back to school," Blaine whispers, cupping his hand around the receiver. It's an awful, private secret. Sometimes it makes Blaine think that those bullies didn't hit him hard enough, that there's something wrong with him that, after everything, he still wants to go back.

"Are you feeling better then?" Cooper asks, and there's hope in his voice.

"No," Blaine says, "I just want to go back."

Go back to what?

To sideways glances in the hallways? To people skirting around him, acting as if he's contagious? To people who used to be his friends avoiding his eyes?

There's nothing for him back there, and he knows it. But here and now, curled up on his parents' bed like when he was little – there's nothing here for him either.

Blaine is too old to bury his head in a book and just forget about reality. He doesn't dream of riding dragons, of befriending centaurs, of finding something magical within himself or in the world. He just wants to get by. He just wants to be himself and not be punished for it.

Is that so much to ask?

"Cooper said you weren't happy here," his mother murmurs into his hair. It's late and Blaine is still sleeping on his parents' bed. He'd curled up there sometime in the afternoon and now everything aches and his breaths are pulling at everything inside him until they hurt. He wonders again if something broke when he was bashed. If there's something wrong with him that will never be fixed.

"I can't stay here," he whispers into the sheets that smell like home and comfort and a pillowed, blanketed, shut-off place of fantasy. "I want to go to school."

"I know, honey."

"I want to go back to school."

"Blaine, it's not-"

"I want to go back!"

He never goes back.

He goes to Dalton instead. To shiny, polished doorhandles, single dorm rooms, study groups, a Harry Potter fan club. To the Warblers. To new friends, a new life, a new world shut-off from reality, but a world that everyone says will be real soon. One day soon.

A world where he sees a gorgeous boy and after too much time (but not _too_ much) he realises that he loves him and they kiss in the common room and hold hands in the hallways and people don't push or shove or punch or kick. People just _be_.

And then he goes to public school again – for Kurt, always for Kurt – and his parents are apprehensive but Blaine hasn't curled up on their bed for years. He doesn't even think they know that Kurt is here now, Kurt is everything now, and Kurt's bed doesn't smell like fantasy, or at least not a bad type of fantasy. Kurt smells disturbingly, wonderfully like home. Like reality.

The faint scars on Kurt's face feel cool and smooth once they're healed. The one on his neck takes an age to heal, and Blaine never gives him a hickey again. His lips get there and the urge to bite is there but it sticks on his tongue in the back of his throat and makes his old scars ache and he stops, he resists. _Too soon_, he always thinks. Then it changes to, _too real_.

And when Kurt and Blaine finally move in together for good, he takes up his old post on the bed on some days. He curls up amidst the pillows, alone in the silence of a properly sound-proofed New York apartment. He pulls one of his old books down from the shelf and it falls open, spine loose and worn. Kurt is moving about in the living room, both of them now content with their own space, their own activities.

It's a wonder what it does to Blaine, this new brand of reality. This beautiful, perfect life of domesticity, of love, of being able to choose when to cocoon himself away and when to face the real world.

There's a graze up Blaine's arm from where he scraped it on the stairwell wall, carrying the sofa up to the apartment last week. It's healing neatly and cleanly. It probably won't scar at all.

As Blaine settles into his bed and his book, he makes believe the graze is a healing burn from dragon fire. That he was soaring far above the land, and everything was as small as ants, and strength coursed through him as he looked down on the world he had won in an epic battle against his evil foe (and that evil foe's evil dragon, of course).

There was a time in Blaine's life where he could be happy shut up alone in a room. Two times, actually.


End file.
